Space m-2

by Stephen Baxter

  Sometimes he thought he could hear a low humming, sniff a little ozone, feel hair-prickling static, as if he was surrounded by immense electrical or magnetic fields that tweaked at his body. Maybe it was so. Electromagnetic fields could be used to stimulate and stress muscles and bones, and even to counter bone wastage; NASA had experimented with such technologies. Maybe the Tree swaddled its human cargo in electricity, fixing their bones and muscles and flesh.

  But maybe there was no need for such clunky gadgetry, a thousand years downstream. After all the Tree provided a pretty healthy environment, of clean air, pure water, toxin-free foods: no pollutants or poisons or pathogens here. And even natural hazards like Earth’s naturally occurring radioactivity in soil and stone could be designed out. Maybe if you gave people a good enough place to live, this was how they turned out, with health and longevity.

  And as for adaptation to microgravity, maybe that came naturally too. After all, he recalled, the dolphins and other aquatic mammals had had no need of centrifuges or electro stimulation to maintain their muscles and bones in the no-gravity environment they inhabited. Maybe these space-dwelling humans had more in common with the dolphins than the bony dirt-treaders of his own kind.

  The Tree itself had been gen-enged from giant ancestors on the Moon. Humans used the Tree for a variety of purposes: port, observation platform, resort. But the Tree’s own purpose was simply to grow and survive, and there seemed no obstacle to its doing so until the Sun itself flickered and died.

  There was more than one Tree.

  In 3265, Earth was encased in a spreading web of vegetation, space-going Trees and spidery airborne tendrils, reaching down from space to the surface. And, slowly, systems were evolving the other way. One day there might be some kind of unlikely biological ladder reaching from Earth to space. It was a strategy to ensure long-term access from space via stable biological means. Nobody could tell Malenfant whose strategy this was, however.

  The colonists in this Tree seemed to care for returning travelers like him with a breed of absent-minded charity. Beyond that, the twins’ motive in speaking to him seemed to be a vague curiosity — maybe even just politeness.

  The Bad Hair Day twins’ variant of English contained a fraction of words, a fifth or a quarter, that were unrecognizable to Malenfant. Linguistic drift, he figured. It had, after all, been a thousand years; he was Chaucer meeting Neil Armstrong.

  “Where did you travel?” they asked.

  “I started at Alpha Centauri. After that I couldn’t always tell. I kind of bounced around.”

  “What did you find?”

  He thought about that. “I don’t know. I couldn’t understand much.”

  It was true. But now — just as Madeleine Meacher and Dorothy Chaum had sought him out, saved his life on that remote Cannonball world without asking his by-your-leave — so the Bad Hair Day twins had thrust unwelcome youth on him. He felt curious again. Dissatisfied. Damn it, he’d gotten used to being old. It had been comfortable.

  There were no other travelers here.

  He soon got bored with the Tree, the incomprehensible artifacts and activities it contained. Lonely, disoriented, he tried to engage the Bad Hair Day twins, his enigmatic nurses. “You know, I remember how Earth looked when I first went up in Columbia, back in ’93 — 1993, that is. In those days we had to ride these big solid rocket boosters up to orbit, you know, and then, and then…”

  The twins would listen politely for a while. But then they would lock on each other, mouths pressed into an airtight seal, small hands sliding over bare flesh, their hair drifting in clouds around them, that bridge of skin between them folded and compressed, and Malenfant was just a sad old fart boring them with war stories.

  If he was going back to Earth, where was he supposed to land?

  He asked the Bad Hair Day twins for encyclopedias, history books. The twins all but laughed at him. The people of A.D. 3265, it seemed, had forgotten history. The Bad Hair Day twins seemed to know little beyond their specialty, which was a limited — if very advanced — medicine. It was… disappointing. On the other hand, how much knowledge or interest had he ever had in the year A.D. 1000?

  He got frustrated. He railed at the twins. They just stared back at him.

  He would have to find out for himself.

  He still had the softscreenlike sensor pack Sally Brind had given him centuries ago, when he set off for the Saddle Point to the Alpha Centauri system. It would work as a multispectral sensor. He could configure it to overlay the images of Earth with representations in infrared, ultraviolet, radar imaging, whatever he wanted; he could select for the signatures of rock, soil, vegetation, water, and the products of industrialization like heavy metals, pollutants.

  Alone, he found a window and studied the planet.

  Earth was indeed depopulated.

  There were humans down there, but no communities bigger than a few tens of thousands. There were no industrial products, save for a thin smear of relics from the past, clustered around the old cities and strung out along the disused roads. He couldn’t even see signs of large-scale agriculture.

  Malenfant studied what was left of the cities of his day, those that had somehow survived the ice. New York, for example.

  In A.D. 3265, New York was green. It was a woodland of birch and oak, pushing out of a layer of elder thicket. He could still make out the shapes of roads, city blocks, and parking lots, but they were green rectangles covered with mosses, lichens, and tough, destructive plants like buddleia. On Manhattan, some of the bigger concrete buildings still stood, like white bones poking above the trees, but they were bereft of windows, their walls stained by fires. Others had subsided, reduced to oddly shaped hummocks beneath the greenery. The bridges had collapsed, leaving shallow weirs along the river. He could see foxes, bats, wolves, deer, feral pigs. And there were more exotic creatures, maybe descended from zoo stock.

  Some of the roads looked in good condition, oddly. Maybe the smart-concrete that was being introduced just before his departure from Earth had kept working. But the big multilane freeway that ran up out of Manhattan looked a little crazy to Malenfant, a wild scribble over grassed-over concrete. Maybe it wasn’t just repairing itself but actually growing, crawling like a huge worm across the abandoned suburbs, a semisentient highway over which no car had traveled for centuries.

  Once Malenfant saw what looked like a hunting party, working its way along the coast of the widened Hudson, stalking a thing like an antelope. The people were tall, naked, golden haired. One of the hunters looked up to the sky, as if directly at Malenfant. It was a woman, her blue eyes empty. She had a neck like a shot-putter. Her face was, he thought, somehow not even human.

  When Malenfant had left Earth, a thousand years ago, he had left behind no direct descendants. His wife, Emma, had died before they had had a chance to have children together. But he’d had relatives: a nephew, two nieces.

  Now there was hardly anybody left on Earth. Malenfant wondered if anybody down there still bore a trace of his genes. And if so, what they had become.

  For sentimental reasons he looked for the Statue of Liberty. Maybe it was washed up on the beach, like in Planet of the Apes. There was no sign of the old lady.

  But he did find a different monument: an artifact kilometers across, a monstrous ring, slap in the middle of downtown Manhattan. It looked like a particle accelerator. Maybe it had something to do with the city’s battle against the ice. Whatever, it didn’t look human. It was out of scale.

  There was other evidence of high technology scattered around the planet, but it didn’t seem to have much to do with humans either. For example, when the Tree drifted over the Pyrenees, the mountains on the crease of land between France and Spain, he could see a threading of light — perfect straight lines of ruby light — joining the peaks like a spiderweb. His screen told him this was coherent light: lased. There were similar systems in other mountainous regions, scattered around the planet. The laser arrays worked cont
inuously. Maybe they were adjusting the atmosphere somehow: burning out CFCs, for instance.

  And he observed flashes from sites around the equator, on Earth’s water hemisphere. A few minutes after each flash the air would get a little mistier. He estimated they must be coming every minute or so, on a global scale. He remembered twenty-first century schemes to increase Earth’s albedo — to increase the percentage of sunlight reflected back into space — by firing submicrometer dust up into the stratosphere: Naval guns could have done the job. The point was to reduce global warming. But the dust would settle out: You would have needed to fire a shot every few seconds, maintained for decades, even centuries. Back then the idea was ridiculed. But such dust injections would account for the increase in global brightness he thought he’d observed.

  This was planetary engineering. All he could see from here were the gross physical schemes. Maybe down on the planet there was more: nanotechnological adjustments, for instance.

  Somebody was fixing the Earth. It didn’t look to Malenfant like it was anybody human. It would, after all, take centuries, maybe millennia. No human civilization could handle projects of that duration, or ever would be able to. So, give the job to somebody else.

  Not every change was constructive.

  In southern Africa there was a dramatic new crater. It looked like a scar in the greenery of the planet. He didn’t know if it was some kind of meteorite scar or an open-cast mine kilometers wide. Machines crawled over the walls and pit of the crater, visibly chewing up shattered rock, extracting piles of minerals, metals. From space, the machines looked like spiders: dodecahedral bodies maybe fifty meters wide, with eight or ten articulated limbs, working steadily at this open wound in the skin of Earth.

  Malenfant had seen such machines before. They were Gaijin factory drones, designed to chew up ice and rock. But now they weren’t off in the asteroid belt or stuck out on the cold rim of the Solar System billions of kilometers away. The Gaijin were here, on the surface of Earth itself. He wondered what they were doing.

  He looked farther afield, seeking people, civilization.

  The most populous place on the planet, it appeared, was some kind of mountaintop community in the middle of Africa. It was, as far as he could remember his geography, in Uganda.

  And there was something odd about its signature in his sensor pack. From a source at the center of the community he plotted heavy particles, debris from what looked like short half-life fission products. And there were some much more energetic particles: almost like cosmic rays.

  But they came from a source embedded deep within Earth itself.

  The only other similar sources, scattered around the planet, looked like deep radioactive-waste dumps.

  The Ugandan community wasn’t civilization, but it was the most advanced-looking technological trace on the planet. Population, and an enigma. Maybe that was the place for him to go.

  The Bad Hair Day twins showed him a wooden spaceship. It was, good God, his atmospheric entry capsule. It was like a seed pod, a flattened sphere of wood a couple of meters across. It was fitted with a basic canvas couch and a life support system — just crude organic filters — that would last a couple of hours, long enough for the entry. The pod even had a window, actually grown into the wood, a blister of some clear stuff like amber. He would have to climb in through a dilating diaphragm that would seal up behind him, like being born in reverse.

  He spent some time hunting out the pod’s heat shield. The Bad Hair Day twins watched, puzzled.

  They kept him on orbit for another month or so, giving him gravity preparation: exercise, a calcium booster, electromagnetic therapy. They gave him a coverall of some kind of biocomposite material, soft to the touch but impossible to rip, smart enough to keep him at the right temperature. He packed inside the sphere his sole personal possession: his old shuttle pressure suit, with its faded Stars and Stripes and the NASA logo, that he’d worn when he flew through that first gateway, a thousand AU from home, a thousand years ago. It was junk, but it was all he had.

  He enjoyed a last sleep in weightlessness.

  When he awoke the Tree was passing over South America. Malenfant could see the fresh water of the Amazon, noticeably paler than the salt of the ocean, the current so strong the waters had still failed to mingle hundreds of kilometers offshore.

  He climbed inside his capsule. The Bad Hair Day twins kissed him, one soft face to either cheek, and sealed him up in warm brown darkness.

  He was whiplashed out of the Tree by a flexing branch. A sensation of weight briefly returned to Malenfant, and he was pressed into his seat. When the castoff was done, the weight disappeared.

  But now the pod was no longer in a free orbit, but falling rapidly toward the air.

  At the fringe of the atmosphere, the pod shuddered around him. He felt very aware of the lightness and fragility of this wooden nutshell within which he was going to have to fall ass-first into the atmosphere.

  Within five minutes of separation from the Tree, frictional deceleration was building up: a tenth, two-tenths of a g. The deceleration piled up quickly, eyeballs-in, shoving him deeper against his couch.

  The pod shuddered violently. Malenfant was cocooned in a dull roaring noise. He gripped his couch and tried not to worry about it.

  As the heat shield rammed deeper into the air, a shell of plasma built up around the hull. Beyond the amber windows the blackness of space was masked by a deep brown, which quickly escalated through orange, a fiery yellow, and then a dazzling white. Particles of soot flew off the scorching outer hull of the pod and streaked over the window, masking his view; now all he could see were extreme surges of brightness, as if fireballs were flying past the craft.

  From the surface of Earth, the ship would be a brilliant meteor, visible even in daylight. He wondered if there was anybody down there who would understand what they saw.

  The oaklike wood of the hull made for a natural heat shield, the Bad Hair Day twins had told him. All that resin would ablate naturally. It was a neater solution than the crude, clanking mechanical gadgets of his own era. Maybe, but he was an old-fashioned guy; he’d have preferred to be surrounded by a few layers of honest-to-God metal and ceramic.

  The glow started to fade, and the deceleration eased. Now the windows were completely blacked over by the soot, but a shield jettisoned with a bang, taking the soot away with it and revealing a circle of clear blue sky.

  There was another crack as the first parachute deployed. The chute snatched at the pod and made it swing violently from side to side. He was pressed against one side of his couch and then the other, with the cabin creaking around him; he felt fragile, helpless, trapped in the couch.

  Two more drogue chutes snapped open, in quick succession, and then the main chute. He could see through his window a huge canopy of green leafy material, like a vegetable cloud against the blue sky. The chute looked reassuringly intact, despite its vegetable origins, and the swaying reduced.

  Malenfant glimpsed the ground. He could even track his progress, with maps in his sensor pack. He’d come down over the island that used to be called Zanzibar, on the east coast of Africa. And now he was drifting inland, to the northwest, toward Lake Victoria. Forest lay like thick green cloth over mountains.

  Malenfant felt his couch rise up beneath him. Collapsing sacs pumped compressed carbon dioxide into the base of his seat, preparing to act as a shock absorber on landing. He was pressed up against the curved roof of his pod, with only a small gap between his knees and the roof itself. He felt hemmed in, heavy, hot. Gravity pulled at him, tangibly.

  The pod hit the ground.

  The parachutes pulled the capsule forward, so Malenfant was tipped up onto his face, and then the pod started to careen across rocky ground, rocking backward and forward, spinning and rattling. His head rattled against his couch headrest.

  Finally the pod slithered to a halt.

  Malenfant found himself suspended on his side, with daylight pouring through the wi
ndow behind him. The shock absorber was still pressing him against the roof, so he couldn’t see outside. He lifted his hands to his face. There was blood in his mouth.

  The pod wall dilated, releasing a flood of hot sunlit air into the capsule, so rich in oxygen and vegetable scents it made him gasp.

  He began the painful process of climbing out.

  His pod had come down on a low pebbly beach. The beach ran in a sinuous light-gray line between the darker gray face of a lake and the living green of a banana grove. From the margin of the lake to the highest hilltop, all he could see was contrasting shades of green, spreading like a carpet.

  This was the northern coast of Lake Victoria. It was the closest place to that population center, with its odd radioactivity signature, that the Bad Hair Day twins would deliver him.

  Once he got his balance, he didn’t have any trouble walking. He didn’t feel dizzy, but oddly disoriented. He could feel his internal organs moving around, seeking a new equilibrium inside him. And he seemed to be immune to sunburn.

  But it was odd to be walking around without his pressure suit. Disconcerting. And the sense of openness, of scale, was startling. After all his travels, Malenfant had become an alien, uncomfortable on the surface of his home world.

  There was no sign of humanity.

  Malenfant made camp in the inert, scorched shell of his pod. He used the bubble helmet of his old NASA pressure suit to collect water from a brook, a little way inland. He ate figs and bananas. He figured if he was stuck here for long he’d try to fish that lake.

  The days were short and hot, although there was usually a scattering of cloud over the blue sky. He set up a stick in the sand and watched its shadow shifting and lengthening with the hours. That way he figured out the time of local noon, and he reset his astronaut’s watch. If he was stuck here long enough he might find the equinox and start filling out a calendar.